How to install MySQL 8 in Docker

In this article, we will look at how to install a MySQL 8 server in a Docker container and see how to connect it to phpMyAdmin in docker-compose, which we installed in the article How to Install phpMyAdmin in Docker.

How to Install Docker

As usual, update the OS packages.

apt update

Install the necessary packages and add a new repository:

apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"

Update the packages with the new repository:

apt update

Install Docker.

apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Check the Docker version:

docker --version

Check the status:

systemctl status docker

If it did not start, start it:

systemctl start docker

And add it to autostart.

systemctl enable docker

Installing Docker-Compose

curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.25.5/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Set execution permissions for the docker-compose file.

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Check if Docker-Compose is installed:

docker-compose --version

As we can see, everything is fine. Let's move on to creating a file for Docker-Compose.

To keep track of where and what we have installed in the future, let's create a separate folder for this project in the /home directory and navigate to it.

mkdir /home/mysql && cd /home/mysql

In this guide, we will install a specific version of MySQL 8. For this, we will use the repository from hub.docker.com

To create the docker-compose.yaml file, we will use the repository from the link https://hub.docker.com/_/mysql

Create the file docker-compose.yaml or docker-compose.yml:

vim docker-compose.yaml

And add the following code to it:

version: '3.1'

services:
   db_mysql:
      container_name: db_mysql
      image: mysql
      ports:
        - "3311:3306"
      restart: always
      environment:
        MYSQL_USER: admin
        MYSQL_PASSWORD: rNZzq5U37DqJlNe
        MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: 4kDGQDYe4JxDjRd
      volumes:
        - /var/lib/mysqld:/var/lib/mysql

Where:

db_mysql: the name of your container;
image: mysql: the image from which MySQL 8 will be deployed;
ports: 3311:3306 - port 3311 which we will use to connect to MySQL;
restart:always - indicates that the container will be restarted in case of failure or server reboot;
mysql_USER: creating a new user, in this case, admin;
mysql_PASSWORD: password for the admin user;
mysql_ROOT_PASSWORD: this password will be set for the MySQL root superuser account;
In volumes we specify a shared directory so that the database data is preserved when the container is restarted.

Run our script (you need to be in the directory where our file is created. In this case, it is /home/mysql):

docker-compose up -d

Wait for the images to download and deploy.

Check:

docker-compose ps

docker ps

How to View Logs

docker logs -f db_mysql

You can also install this version of MySQL 8 along with phpMyAdmin and link it to it. Let's see how to do this.

Edit the created file docker-compose.yaml

vim docker-compose.yaml

Add the following structure below:

version: '3.1'

services:
   db_mysql:
      container_name: db_mysql
      image: mysql
      ports:
        - "3311:3306"
      restart: always
      environment:
        MYSQL_USER: admin
        MYSQL_PASSWORD: rNZzq5U37DqJlNe
        MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: 4kDGQDYe4JxDjRd
      volumes:
        - /var/lib/mysqld:/var/lib/mysql
   phpmyadmin:
      container_name: phpmyadmin
      image: phpmyadmin
      restart: always
      ports:
        - "8091:80"
      environment:
        - PMA_HOST=db_mysql
      depends_on:
        - db_mysql

In the phpmyadmin section, we added the phpmyadmin image, specified port 8091 for it, but now it will be linked to a specific database server, namely the MySQL 8 server we installed/deployed.

This parameter is specified in the environment block where:
PMA_HOST=db_mysql - points to the MySQL container/block described above in this file.
Also, the depends_on directive indicates the dependency of the start/launch on the db_mysql container. This means that the phpmyadmin container will not start until the mysql container starts.

We can start phpmyadmin and mysql with one command.

docker-compose up -d

Check:

docker-compose ps

As we can see, the containers are running.

Similarly, you can install the version of the MariaDB database you need. How to do this can be found in this article.

We also suggest considering other useful articles: